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Geertz’s Challenge:
Is It Possible to Be a Robust Cultural Pluralist
and a Dedicated Political Liberal at the Same Time?
r ichard a. shweder
We seem to be in need of a new variety of politics, a politics which does not
regard ethnic, religious, racial, linguistic, or regional assertiveness as so much
irrationality, archaic and ingenerate, to be suppressed or transcended . . . . It de-
pends on developing a less simplistically demonizing, blankly negative attitude
toward it as a relic of some savage or some early stage of human existence. It
depends on adapting the principles of liberalism and social democracy, still our
best guides for law, government, and public deportment, to matters with respect
to which they have been too often dismissively reactive or uncomprehending;
philosophically blind . . . . That is, a new approach depends on our gaining
a better understanding of how culture, the frames of meaning within which
people live and form their convictions, their selves, and their solidarities, comes
to us an ordering force in human affairs.1
“Geertz’s Challenge” is a response to a provocative, taxing, and unsettling ques-
tion raised with a sense of urgency by the late great American anthropologist
Clifford Geertz during the last decade of his life.2 The interrogative I have in
mind was so strongly implied as to be nearly visible on the surface of several of
his writings (see above) and can be formulated most generally as follows: How
is it possible to be a robust cultural pluralist and a dedicated political liberal at
the same time? Is it coherent to embrace, justify, or defend ways of life grounded
in durable bonds of ethnic, cultural, and religious community while also (a)
endorsing individual autonomy, (b) valuing transactions and forms of associa-
tion premised on freedom of choice, and (c) acting in accordance with the duty
to treat all individuals equally with regard to their just claims regardless of their
ethnic, cultural, religious, or family backgrounds? Alternatively stated: What are
the specific way(s) robust cultural pluralism and dedicated political liberalism
might be reconciled, if at all?3
186 richarda.shweder
Geertz posed his query as a philosophical provocation and a public policy
challenge; in the daunting face of which this essay is little more than the prepa-
ration of some conceptual ground as a prelude to the development of an ad-
equate response. He posed his query in part because he recognized that we live
in a tumultuous post–Cold War era, marked by a combustible mixture of neo-
liberal globalization, expanding markets, the borderless free flow of everything
(including the type of labor migration across cultural divides that raises hot
button issues about the scope of domestic tolerance for alien beliefs, values, and
customs), ethnonational conflicts (for example, in Eastern Europe, in West Asia,
and in various regions in Africa), and domestic multicultural anxieties (for ex-
ample, almost everywhere).4 The world is “growing both more global and more
divided, more thoroughly interconnected and more intricately partitioned, at
the same time. As the one increases, so does the other,” he wrote;5 and he an-
ticipated that this volatile period in human history, during which the forces of
integration (for example, of local economies) and the forces of separation (for
example, empowering ethnonational identities and challenging the integrity of
multinational states) walk hand in hand, was not likely to be short lived.
He also posed his query because he understood that some of the more de-
structive collisions between “nations”6 caused skeptical questions to be raised
that any self-reflective cultural pluralist (who is also a faithful citizen of a mod-
ern liberal state) must sooner or later confront: not only questions about the
future of cultural pluralism in a liberal cosmopolitan world system but also
questions about the future of cosmopolitan political liberalism in a culturally
balkanized world.
Robust Cultural Pluralism and Dedicated Political Liberalism in a “Differenced World”
Clifford Geertz was himself a robust cultural pluralist. He believed that cul-
tural diversity was inherent in the human condition and that the ecumenical or
missionary impulse to value uniformity over variety and to overlook, devalue,
subordinate, or even eradicate difference was not a good thing. Based on his
reading of history and his case-based knowledge of the current international
multicultural scene (for example, in Canada, the former Yugoslavia, Sri Lanka,
Nigeria, India, and Indonesia) he viewed it as evident that cultural differences
Geertz’schallenGe 187
derived from real or imagined primordial ties to ancestral groups are ever-pres-
ent, robust, and resilient, a fact about which he had no global regrets.
Indeed, one of his main accomplishments as a writer of ethnographies was to
help us understand how it is possible for morally decent and intellectually rea-
sonable members of the divergent cultural lineages in our global human family
to live their lives guided by goals, values, and pictures of the world very differ-
ent from our own.7 In other words, his ethnographies sought to show us how
it is possible for normal members of other cultural worlds or “nations” to live
their lives piloted by different conceptions of the self, of gender, of morality, of
emotions, of religion, of political and legal authority, of property, of kinship, of
even different conceptions of time, space, causation, and the good life. His was a
version of cultural pluralism in which one seeks, to the extent it is possible (and
there are times it is not possible), to understand others as coequal moral subjects
(rather than as defective moral subjects or as mere objects); and to do so without
assuming that if two nations are moral equals then their goals, values, pictures of
the world, and ways of life must be uniform or essentially the same.
Nevertheless when the famous anthropologist took the measure of primor-
dial group identities, anxieties, hostilities, and fears in the contemporary world,
and the associated political disorder, his assessment of various extant multicul-
tural realties (domestic and global) was not necessarily pretty. His words and
judgment on this matter are haunting: “[T]he image of a world full of people
so passionately fond of each other’s cultures that they aspire only to celebrate
one another does not seem to me a clear and present danger,” he wrote. “[T]he
image of one full of people happily apotheosizing their heroes and diabolizing
their enemies alas does.”
He was mindful, alas, that we live in an age when political and marketplace
transactions (including competition for jobs, land, natural resources), both do-
mestic and international, produce fateful (and sometimes destructive) encoun-
ters between members of ancestrally distinct groups, resulting in the mutual de-
monizing of the “other.” “Positioning Muslims in France, Whites in South Africa,
Arabs in Israel, or Koreans in Japan are not altogether the same sort of thing,” he
noted. “But if political theory is going to be of any relevance at all in the splin-
tered world, it will have to have something cogent to say about how, in the face
of a drive towards a destructive integrity, such structures can be brought into
being, how they can be sustained, and how they can be made to work.”8 And of
188 richarda.shweder
course we are not talking here just of Muslims in France or Koreans in Japan, but
also of Bangladeshis in Saudi Arabia, Gambians in Norway, Francophones, Fili-
pinos, and Inuit in Canada, Guatemalans in Mexico, Thais in Israel, and Mexi-
cans, Samoans, Amish, Haitians, Satmar Hasidim, Palestinians, Cubans, Somalis,
Hmong, and many others in the United States, and so on and so forth.
Geertz was not only a robust cultural pluralist but also a political liberal,
although a nervous one, who was aware that a major cause of the “drive towards
a destructive integrity” in the modern world was the ethnonationalist impulse
to disaggregate or dismantle multinational states and resolve them into a world
of political communities in which nation, people, state, and country—culture
and politics—are made to coincide. He describes resistance to ethnonational-
ism as a “moral imperative.” Making that point, although somewhat elliptically,
he writes: “Resisting the coalescence of the dimensions of political community
[nation, state, country, people], keeping the very lines of affinity that turn ab-
stract populations into public actors separate and visible, seems suddenly, once
again, conceptually useful, morally imperative, and politically realistic.”9 Not
very far from the surface of his writings on this subject is his clear and consid-
ered judgment about the worthiness of what I shall later argue is a distinctively
liberal American conception of nationality: a conception of a “civil political
community” in which all the people who are citizens of the state and are willing
to live their lives constrained by a basic set of liberal democratic principles with
respect to (what Geertz described as)10 the “law, government and public com-
portment” are part of the nation, regardless of their ethnic, racial, or religious
origins. Later too I will have more to say about this type of state-based concep-
tion of nationality (which contrasts sharply with any nation-based conception
of the state), and I will clarify both conceptions.
Geertz, however, was acutely aware that critics of political liberalism around
the world often argue that liberals are prevented precisely because of their com-
mitments (for example, to the liberal ideals of autonomy, equal life chances,
and the freedoms of expression, association, and choice) from celebrating (or
from even tolerating) cultural differences, especially when those cultural di-
vides or separations are sustained by means of real or imagined primordial
ties to ancestral groups. As a robust cultural pluralist and a dedicated political
liberal it made him edgy to see such critics argue, as he put it in one brief but
effective summary of their views, that political liberals are barred by their own
liberal principles “from recognizing the force and durability of ties of religion,
Geertz’schallenGe 189
language, custom, locality, race, and descent in human affairs, or from regard-
ing the entry of such considerations into civic life as other than pathologi-
cal—primitive, backward, regressive, and irrational.”
So he offered up his challenge: can anthropologists, political philosophers,
and globalization theorists develop a version of liberalism with both the cour-
age and the capacity to engage itself with (rather than try to homogenize) “a
differenced world”? And can they do so with regard to, and respect for, a multi-
cultural world in which at least some of that diversity has its source in the real or
imagined primordial ties of individuals to kith and kin and particular ancestral
groups, and not in some original autobiographical act of free choice or expres-
sive liberty?
The writer died before he was able to fully spell out his own affirmative
response to his own questions. Nevertheless, he invited us to rethink the impli-
cations of political liberalism, to search for a practical philosophical antidote
to the “diabolizing” of others and, thus, to develop a way of thinking about the
reality and organization of ethnic, religious, and racial differences in the con-
temporary world which, even though it might fall short of getting us to actually
celebrate diversity, might at the very least support an attitude of cooperative
mutual sufferance among culturally distinct groups.
Keeping Cultural and Political Identities Straight: From Nation v. State to Nation (Based)-State v. State (Based)-Nation
Even a prelude to an answer to a challenging question benefits from the
clarification of terms. This is especially true in an essay concerned to distinguish
between nations and states and to then build out of that contrast a second dis-
tinction between a nation-state and a state-nation (which, for sake of clarifying
the sought-after distinction, I will also refer to as the distinction between a na-
tion [based]-state) and a state [based]-nation). I hope to keep those identities
straight and separate here and elsewhere in this essay.
Nation v. State Defined
When I speak of nations I use the term “nation” in the premodern sense, to
refer to any people or potential in-group or faction, regardless of population
size, whose members are networked or tied to each other by a real or imagined
190 richarda.shweder
common ethnic ancestry and shared cultural heritage, whether or not the na-
tion coincides with a territory/country controlled by a sovereign political entity
such as a state. I use the term “state” to mean any sovereign governing body that
is an instrument for the realization of collective goods with political, legal, and
compulsive (police/military) control over a territory as made manifest in (a) the
authority of the sovereign governing body to legislate and define the norms of
behavior within that territory and regulate transactions (both cooperative and
hostile) with other sovereign political entities, (b) the power of the sovereign
governing body to enforce those norms and transactions, and (c) the capacity
of the sovereign governing body to be recognized by, and to recognize, other
sovereign political entities as such.
The idea of nation used in this essay is meant to be reminiscent of the semi-
nal concept of a cultural community developed by the German romantic phi-
losopher Johann Herder, and his vision of the world composed of historically
grounded communities, each appealing to some local conception of truth, vir-
tue, and beauty and dedicated to divergent social norms that seem justified in
the light of those local conceptions.11 The real existence of a primordial group
(whose members feel tied to each other in the ways suggested) does not depend
on the historical or ethnographic truth of those primordial ties (they can be and
often are fictive to some more or less substantial extent); when it comes to the
reality of primordial groups, collective memory and the sense of fellow-feeling
it promotes trumps true history, and true history may be far less relevant to the
formation and analysis of the behavior of primordial groups than one might
suppose. Herder’s view, which linked the self-development of individuals to the
freedom of primordial groups to flourish and to try to develop their distinc-
tive ways of life, has been cogently summarized by British political philosopher
Isaiah Berlin as follows: “For Herder there is a plurality of incommensurable
cultures. To belong to a given community, to be connected with its members
by indissoluble and impalpable ties of a common language, historical memory,
habit, tradition and feeling, is a basic human need no less natural than that
for food or drink or security or procreation. One nation can understand and
sympathize with the institutions of another only because it knows how much
its own mean to itself. Cosmopolitanism is the shedding of all that makes one
most human, most oneself.”12
Perhaps that last sentence will seem shocking to some readers, especially
Geertz’schallenGe 191
those who live or idealize a liberal cosmopolitan/individualistic/ nationless way
of life. But that in itself is not surprising given that Herder’s conceptualization
of cultural community was in large measure an act of intellectual resistance
to the European Enlightenment ideal for a modern self with its highly indi-
vidualistic image of a fully realized human person: as one who has become
liberated or emancipated from all traditions, from all revelations or faith-based
attachments to groups, from all commitments to received values or pictures of
the world other than those that can be worked out by oneself and universally
justified or grounded in logic or science. It is that cosmopolitan vision of the
liberated individual (who is at home nowhere in particular or feels at home only
when detached from all groups and loyal to none) that Johann Herder opposed
and viewed as the shedding of all that makes us most human.
David Miller, a political philosopher of the left, makes the point this way:
“Nations stretch backwards into the past, and indeed in most cases their origins
are conveniently lost in the mists of time. In the course of this history various
significant events have occurred, and we can identify with the actual people
who acted at those moments, reappropriating their deeds as our own. . . . The
historical national community is a community of obligation. Because our fore-
bears have toiled and spilt their blood to build and defend the nation, we who
are born into it inherit an obligation to continue their work, which we discharge
partly towards our contemporaries and partly towards our descendants. The
historical community stretches forward into the future too. This then means
that when we speak of the nation as an ethical community, we have in mind not
merely the kind of community that exists between a group of contemporaries
who practice mutual aid among themselves and would dissolve at the point at
which that practice ceases: but a community which, because it stretches back
and forward across the generations, is not one which the present generation
can renounce. Here we begin to see something of the depth of national com-
munities which may not be shared by other more immediate forms of associa-
tion.”13
Roger Scruton, a political philosopher of the right, makes the point wryly, this
way: “Since the Enlightenment, it has been normal for Europeans to think of so-
ciety as a contract. The novelty of the idea is two-fold: first, it implies that social
membership is a free choice. Second, it suggests that all members of society are
currently living. Neither of these thoughts is true.” “Care for the dead and care
192 richarda.shweder
for the unborn go hand in hand,” Scruton then avers, strongly suggesting that
those who are alive act as though they are part of a historical ethical community
(even though in the secular modern world they lack a language for expressing
their communal commitments) and avoid “pillage” and “sacrilege” by allowing
the dead and the unborn to have a vote on how one lives one’s life today.14
Given those definitions and interpretations of the idea of a nation and the
idea of a state, one can readily (and coherently) conceptualize the existence of a
nation without a corresponding state (Jews in the Diaspora prior to the forma-
tion of the nation-state of Israel, Kurds in the Diaspora today, Tamils living in
Sri Lanka, Sunni Muslims living in India, the Amish or the Seminoles living in
the United States); indeed, that has been the characteristic state of affairs for
nations, most of which have existed within the political framework of some
multinational or multicultural state, rather than in the political framework of
a nation-state. One can thus also readily (and coherently) conceptualize the
existence of states in which the territories controlled by the sovereign governing
body are occupied by peoples from many nations. States of that sort I shall refer
to as multinational states. Over the course of recorded human history most
people most of the time have lived in multinational states, some of the clearest
examples of which are empires or imperial states, such as the Roman Empire,
the Austro-Hungarian Empire, or the Ottoman Empire.
The global breadth and historical depth of the human experience of living in
multinational states is impressive. A short list of political formations with mul-
tinational characteristics, often with the members of diverse nations or cultur-
ally distinct ancestral groups residing in enclaves, cantons, or millets within the
territorial borders of the multinational state and under the ultimate (although
in practice often quite limited) governing authority of a single (often culturally,
ethnically, and religiously and even physically remote) sovereign, includes the
following empires: the Akkadian, Ancient Egyptian, Incan, Ethiopian, Athenian,
Hellenic, Roman, Byzantine, Aztec, Mayan, Persian, Latin, Mongol, Spanish, Chi-
nese, Mughal, Siam, Holy Roman, Ottoman, and Austro-Hungarian empires;
the African empires of Ghana, Benin, Bamana, the Second Mexican, Brazilian,
Russian, German, French, and British empires; and also, as I shall suggest later,
the currently emerging global multinational state or transnational liberal em-
pire—the “New World Order”—in which the diverse peoples or nations of the
world come under the formal regulatory control of a culturally and education-
Geertz’schallenGe 193
ally distant cosmopolitan elite whose power is exercised through various global
political, legal, financial, military, moral, and economic organizations, such as
the WTO, the World Court, the United Nations, the World Bank, and the IMF.
Consider, for example, the following observation about the multinational
character of the Ottoman Empire, made by the historian David Fromkin in his
account of the demise (around World War I) of that long-standing multina-
tional political arrangement.15 Fromkin writes: “According to the eleventh edi-
tion of the Encyclopedia Britannica (–) the Ottoman Empire at the time
was inhabited by twenty-two different ‘races’ [read ‘nations’], yet no such thing
as an Ottoman nation has ever been created.” He goes on to say: “Within the
Empire (as distinct from the steppes to its east) even those who spoke Turkish
were often of non-Turkish origin. Sir Mark Sykes, a British member of parlia-
ment who had traveled extensively in Asia, began one of his books by asking:
‘How many people realize, when they speak of Turkey and the Turks, that there
is no such place and no such people . . . ?’ The ancient homeland of the Turkish
peoples, Turkestan, was in the possession of Russia and China. More than half
the Turkish peoples of Asia lived either there or elsewhere outside the Ottoman
Empire, so that the Czar [the sovereign of a different multinational state—the
Russian Empire] could lay greater claim to speak for the ethnic Turks than
could the Sultan.” And, as Fromkin notes, the cities of the Ottoman Empire
(Baghdad, Cairo, Algiers, and Damascus) were full of people of mixed national
background “spanning the vast range of ancient peoples and cultures that ex-
tended from the Atlantic Ocean to the Persian Gulf.”
Even to mention the Ottoman Empire is, of course, to run the risk that the
reader will either immediately bring to mind the image of aggressive marauding
bands of medieval warriors whose notion of economic success was to invade
new territories for the sake of capturing wealth and slaves—a style of domina-
tion associated with several European powers as well (for example Spain and
Portugal) that is neither peaceful, orderly, nor just. Or else one runs the risk the
reader will bring to mind images from the final years of a dissolving multina-
tional state in the early twentieth century—images of horrifying ethnic conflicts
between particular pairs of groups (the Turks and Greeks, the Turks and the Ar-
menians, and so forth) that were largely motivated by modern aspirations and
a political discourse aimed at national self-determination and the formation of
autonomous nation-states.
194 richarda.shweder
So some caveats and qualifications are in order. Conquest is something the
Ottoman Turks did very well for a few hundred years starting in the thirteenth
century, before their rate of expansion was slowed, offset, and then reversed by
another empire at the gates of Vienna in . Notably, however, the Ottoman
Empire managed to remain viable as a diverse and multinational state for an ad-
ditional years, until , when its domestic realm was divided and its reach
dismembered by modern ethnonational succession movements (Serbian, Bul-
garian, Greek, Armenian, Saudi) and as a result of the political settlements that
followed its military defeat in World War I. Today there are historians who look
back on that political settlement with regret (“the peace to end all peace”
as Fromkin refers to it in his brilliant book by that title). Here I am simply ab-
stracting out a few features of the Ottoman multinational political order in the
eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. It might be a way of imagining some of the
possible contours of a future, relatively stable global multinational world. And
indeed, the Ottoman Empire, despite its many foibles and failings, and ultimate
dissolution, had managed for an impressively long time to make space (and had
figured out a way, through decentralized and indirect rule, to maintain some
semblance of peaceful coexistence) for the many diverse peoples, religions, and
ethnic groups (“nations”) incorporated within its expansive territory.
There are other risks to using the domestic Ottoman case as a model for
thinking about a future international or transnational society. If the reader
hasn’t already recoiled at the mention of the Ottoman as a multinational state
because of an association with military conquest, an alternative feeling of wari-
ness might arise from images of court intrigue, fratricidal conflicts, corruption,
or even the loss of economic and legal independence (granting extraterritorial
jurisdiction—the so-called capitulations—to foreign powers, for example). In
the nineteenth century the Ottoman Empire ran up a huge national debt (per-
haps not unlike the United States today) and became more and more depen-
dent on foreign capital and loans to keep themselves afloat (also not unlike the
United States today). Needless to say, none of those are the aspects of Ottoman
domestic society that I have in mind when I mention the multinational Otto-
man state in the context of imagining possible models for global society today.
In making these remarks I am not trying to be nostalgic about the Ottomans
so much as to draw a lesson or two from their approach to the challenges of
diversity (of peoples). Those challenges are not unlike those we face today.
Geertz’schallenGe 195
There are many notable features of multinational states. In the context of
a discussion of robust cultural pluralism one particular feature deserves men-
tion: in a genuine multinational state there is often no popular consensus about
how sovereign state power should specifically be exercised, precisely because
the state consists of diverse peoples (for example, those twenty-two “races”),
who are diverse in the sense that they live their lives in somewhat different
ways, according sacred or customary authority to different social norms, and
guided by somewhat different goals, values, and pictures of the world. In the
Ottoman Empire, at least in the years prior to the modern emergence of strong
ethnonationalist movements, those diverse nations lived their lives for the most
part separated from each other in a state of mutual coexistence and with an
attitude of mutual sufferance, and without much interference from the central
government (except for the direct or often indirect collection of taxes and the
maintenance of existing physical boundaries between the nations). In practice
the everyday governing power of the sovereign was limited, leaving plenty of
space for diverse peoples pretty much to do as they wanted with regard to their
own local customs, rituals, and beliefs.
As the political and moral philosopher Michael Walzer has aptly remarked,
therein inviting us to imagine the Ottoman governing elite incorporating Jo-
seph Smith and the Mormon community into their multinational state: “The
Ottoman Empire, for example, would have had no problems with Mormon
polygamy—and wouldn’t have had problems whatever its own standard family
arrangements.”16 Indeed, there probably was no “standard family arrangement”
in the Ottoman Empire, given that the empire was not a single nation at all. In
other words, at least during some substantial part of its seven-hundred-year
existence, the Ottoman Empire was a heyday for robust cultural pluralism. Wal-
zer also discusses the Ottoman case and the institutional structures that make
for de facto toleration between nations in multinational empires in a brilliant
schematic chapter called “Five Regimes of Toleration” (Multicultural Empires,
International Society, Consociations, Nation-States, and Immigrant Societies)
in his book On Toleration.17 The distinction drawn and introduced below be-
tween nation (based)-states and state (based)-nations is built on many of the
same features discussed by Walzer in his treatment of some of the contrasts
between what he calls “nation-states” and “immigrant societies.”
Finally, to round out this first part of this definitional exercise one can imag-
196 richarda.shweder
ine two other logical possibilities: () a state without any nation (the nation-less
state) and () a nation with many states (the multistate nation) (although the
historical viability of either of those forms of political association may be argu-
able).
A state without a nation would by definition be a sovereign political body
with legislative, regulative, and enforcement powers over a society of individu-
als who lacked ancestral ties and autobiographical attachments to any primary
groups (ethnic, racial, religious, linguistic, or regional) and had absolutely no
cultural heritage or sense of primordial communal loyalty or identity. The indi-
vidual citizens of such a nationless state (which might in principle be global in
its political power and regulatory reach) would live and comprehend their lives
and develop their beliefs, values, and normative commitments free of any tradi-
tion and all traditions, and exclusively within the terms legislated and enforced
by the state, which depending on the nature of the state, might or might not be
in liberal terms. Perhaps such nationless citizens, an undifferentiated mass of
strangers whose sense of self had no reference to primordial bonds of any sort,
might speak Esperanto and be raised from birth by the state, detached from
all bonds to kith and kin, and with no sense of tradition, accumulated social
capital, or ancestry. As far as I know no example of a nationless state, populated
entirely by individuals who have no historical or contemporary sense of them-
selves or fellow feeling for other members of their historically shaped kind,
has ever existed. As we shall see (below) certain theoretical varieties of secular
cosmopolitan individualism (conceptualizing a world or some region of the
world—Europe, for example—as a state without nations populated by deraci-
nated individuals who are uniformly governed by means of some transnational
rule of law) invite us to push our imagination (it would be Herder’s nightmare)
in that extreme anticommunitarian civic republican direction.
In contrast, there are real instances of the multistate nation (for example,
the states of East Pakistan and West Pakistan, if one views the Sunni Muslims
of British Imperial India as a single nation; or the nationally akin but politically
distinct states of East Germany and West Germany). If one defines the boundar-
ies of the nation broadly enough (for example, if Scandinavia is a nation), then
there are many instances of the multistate nation. The Scandinavian nation, for
example (if there is such a nation), manifests its historical and cultural heritage
and way of life by means of several states (Sweden, Denmark, and Norway).
Geertz’schallenGe 197
And if whole “civilizations” (for example, Western Christendom, the Muslim
World, sub-Saharan Africa) are ever really and credibly thought of as “nations,”
as Samuel Huntington has proposed,18 then again there will be many cases of
the multistate nation. Nevertheless, in such cases, it seems likely that over time
the relevant and operative national identity will lead either to a unification of
the multistates (as with the case of the unification of the two German states,
which is something that has not happened within Western Christendom, sub-
Saharan Africa, or the Muslim World, perhaps because national identities do
not attach themselves to whole civilizations, as nominally defined by history
textbooks or studies of cultural diffusion); or alternatively will lead to the po-
litical division of such postulated but merely nominal national identities (as in
the case of South Asian Sunni Muslims, where a Bengali language based and
Northeast coast of India regional Muslim national identity led to the formation
of the independent state of Bangladesh and separation from Pakistan). The
case of Scandinavians is also instructive, where Danes, Swedes, and Norwegians
think of themselves as three nations not one, and do not seem inclined to unify
their states or their languages, even as they abstractly recognize a broad shared
cultural kinship that in principle differentiates all three of them from the Finns,
the Dutch, the Flemish, the Russians, and the Germans.
Nation (Based)-States v. State (Based)-Nations Defined
Having distinguished the idea of a nation from the idea of a state (and briefly
acknowledged the historical pervasiveness of multinational states and the argu-
ably unstable existence of multistate nations), it becomes possible to define and
identify two other forms of political community—the nation-state (henceforth
the nation [based]-state) and the state-nation (henceforth the state [based]-na-
tion), both of which are of great significance in the modern world and may well
be modern creations. I use the phrase “nation (based)-state” to denote monon-
ational states—that is to say, states that originate out of a prior national identity
and use their legislative authority and judicial and police/military powers to
promote the beliefs, values, and social practices associated with that national
identity; and where the territory controlled by the sovereign political entity
is governed as though it were a special preserve, sanctuary, or homeland for
members of some single nation (Denmark for the Danes, Bulgaria for the Bul-
198 richarda.shweder
gars, Armenia for the Armenians, Turkey for the Turks, Kurdistan for the Kurds,
Palestine for the Palestinians, Israel for the Jews, a sovereign Navaho reservation
for the Navahos).
In such cases political citizenship tends to be associated with a particular
national identity, defined Herder-like “by a shared heritage, which usually in-
cludes a common language, a common faith and a common ethnic ancestry,” as
the intellectual historian Jerry Z. Muller has put the matter in his discussion of
the power and emergence of ethnonationalism as a peculiarly modern force.19
Muller makes the telling historical point: “Today, people tend to take the na-
tion-state for granted as the natural form of political association and regard
empires as anomalies. But over the broad sweep of recorded history, the op-
posite is closer to the truth. Most peoples at most times have lived in empires
[multinational states], with the nation-state the exception rather than the rule.”
In the light of Muller’s historical observation it is tempting to imagine that the
future shape of the New World Order might amount to the return of empire on
a global scale, albeit a liberal empire that accommodates itself to the reality of
robust cultural pluralism and endorses the Herder-like principle that the self-
development of individuals and the liberty of peoples to flourish and promote
their distinctive ways of life go hand in hand. Much more will be said later in
the essay about this augury.
In any case, whatever the facts might be about the scope of its distribution
and durability over time and territory, the modern nation (based)-state, as I
will use the phrase, is, by definition, mononational in its conception of itself.
It is crucial to emphasize that this does not necessarily imply that the actual
populations of nation (based)-states are in fact perfectly homogeneous with
respect to primordial characteristics such as ethnicity, race, religion, language,
or cultural heritage. Michael Walzer makes the relevant point clearly when he
writes: “Homogeneity is rare, if not nonexistent, in the world today. [To call a
state a nation-state] . . . means only that a single dominant group organizes the
common life in a way that reflects its own history and culture, and, if things
go as intended, carries the history forward and sustains the culture. It is these
intentions that determine the character of public education, the symbols and
ceremonies of public life, the state calendar and the holidays it enjoins. Among
histories and cultures, the nation-state is not neutral; its political apparatus is
an engine for national reproduction.”20
Geertz’schallenGe 199
It is just as crucial to emphasize that this mononational concept of the state
is the ideal or object of desire for so-called ethnonationalistic movements,
whose overriding impulse is to form a political community based on a pri-
mordial sense of fellow feeling in which nation, state, and territory coincide.
In such instances the state is the instrument of the nation and has as one of its
main purposes the furthering of the development (moral, spiritual, social, and
economic) of a “people.” This was the case in the original formation of nation
(based)-states such as Denmark, Italy, Greece, France, Croatia, or Israel—each
was created when the members of some particular nation (real or imagined)
not only conceptualized themselves as an in-group or faction (based on com-
mon descent, religion, culture, ethnicity, race, or language) but also sought
sovereignty and independence from the governing body of some preexisting
multinational state.
There are many nations throughout the world today living without states
of their own, from Francophiles in Canada to Kurds in Iraq or Turkey to Al-
banian Muslims in Serbia to Catalans and Basques in Spain to Palestinians on
the West Bank to the Flemish in Belgium to various Native American Indian
nations in the United States and Canada, whose members are motivated by an
ethnonational impulse and its nation-state ideal. In each instance members of
these nations seek to establish a political community ultimately grounded on a
personal trust and social bond promoting sense of fellow feeling for members
of some real or imagined primordial self-defining “kind.”
Indeed, as noted earlier, it has not gone unnoticed that the rise of what is
sometimes called “the modern state system” is largely the story of the demise
of multinational states or empires. The ascendancy of the modern nation
(based)-state is a complex (and often violent) story about the separation (or
depending on where you stand the “liberation” or “uplifting”) of nations or
peoples by means of migration, succession, deportation, civil war, genocide,
or the incorporation of smaller nations and peoples into some relatively larger
and homogenizing national “mainstream” by means of missionary efforts and
forced or voluntary conversion, cooptation, or assimilation.21 The latter pro-
cesses—conversion, cooptation, and assimilation—are typically motivated by
the personal desire of members of minority nations to acquire the mainstream
cultural capital (associated with the dominant national group) necessary for
material success, upward mobility, and social prestige in the context of some
200 richarda.shweder
particular nation (based)-state. Overall, and in one way or another, whether
voluntary or coerced, whether accomplished peacefully or not, a process that in
its effects looks very much like cultural customs control and “ethnic cleansing”
has gone hand in hand with the formation of the modern nation-state. As the
old and dismal observation goes, the modern nation-state is “born in sin.”
Jerry Muller argues that ethnonationalism (the impulse to form nation
[based]-states) is not only a deep feature of European modernity but is a con-
comitant of the spread of modernity on a global scale.22 With regard to Europe
per se he even suggests that the forty years of European stability after World
War II and prior to the end of the Cold War was due in some measure to the
success of various ethnonational movements. It was a peace forged between na-
tion (based)-states and worked out over hundreds of years, and at a very great
price, by means of all the processes noted above—of separation, civil conflict,
and war (including World War II), and forced and voluntary conversion or as-
similation. It was a peace that resulted from rewriting territorial borders and
redistributing or relocating the populations of different nations so as to create
temporarily stable political boundaries between nation (based)-states. With
regard to the last hundred or so years Muller observes that “a survey would
show that whereas in there were many states in Europe without a single
overwhelming dominant nationality, by there were only two, and one
of those, Belgium, was close to breaking up. Aside from Switzerland, in other
words—where the domestic ethnic balance of power is protected by strict citi-
zenship laws—in Europe the ‘separatist project’ has not so much vanished as
triumphed.”23
Keeping Cultural and Political Identities Separate: The American Exception as a Multinational State (Based)-Nation and Not an Anglo-Protestant Nation (Based)-State
Muller avers that the United States of America may be an exception to the
rule (so far) and that Americans are in possession of an alternative conception
of nationality, one apparently more in keeping with the spirit of a multinational
state, although one that is not governed like an empire. It is a conception of the
sort I believe Clifford Geertz had in mind when he challenged political philoso-
phers, anthropologists, and globalization theorists to creatively reconcile robust
Geertz’schallenGe 201
cultural pluralism and dedicated political liberalism and have the courage to
apply their political theories globally to our “differenced world.”
The American exception is historically unusual indeed, despite the obvious
and consequential failures of the original founding political community with
respect to the many (indigenous) Indian and (imported) African nations of
North America;24 and it invites the postulation of a form of political association
that is a state (based)-nation rather than a nation (based)-state. As noted earlier
a nation (based)-state (such as Israel or Serbia or perhaps one day Chechnya,
Quebec, Kurdistan, or Pashtunistan) is a readily identifiable and previously ex-
isting nation (a group whose members feel bound to each other through real
and imagined primary ancestral ties and a shared cultural heritage) that mani-
fests itself (expresses and perpetuates its particular way of life) in the form and
through the powers of a state.
In the case of a state (based)-nation the opposite is more nearly true. A state
(based)-nation is a political community where the state gives birth to a nation
and provides the design for a new communal identity. Thus, in the case of the
state (based)-nation, national identity (and associated feelings of common an-
cestry, shared heritage, and even fellow feeling) is largely a matter of devotion
to the basic constitutional principles that made possible the formation of the
state in the first place or originally. In political communities of that type (state
[based]-nations), the political community becomes an additional or supple-
mental source of national identity; and thus the founding political moments,
the founding political “fathers,” and the founding political contract or constitu-
tion become highly salient symbols; and the celebration and reiteration of one’s
commitment to the state and especially its basic constitutive political principles
becomes one of the central messages of public communal ritual (for example,
the never-ending election season in the United States). In political communi-
ties of that type (state [based]-nations), the most widely shared national heri-
tage that is relevant to personal identity formation (for example, to American
national identity) is defined by the constitutional principles underlying the
founding of the political community, and the only common ancestry that re-
ally matters (for example, when it comes to being part of the American nation)
is not ethnic, racial, or religious ancestry but rather a shared sense of fictive or
adoptive kinship with the heroic or even mythic progenitors and protectors of
the values and principles constitutive of the state.
202 richarda.shweder
The recent election of U.S. president Barack Hussein Obama (whose broad
appeal to American voters was not unrelated to the fact that from the point of
view of almost every primordial ancestral characteristic—race, religion, ethnic-
ity—he is the personification of a hybrid identity and of complex mixed roots)
is not only the apotheosis of this state (based)-nation conception of American
national identity, but also a reminder to the world (and to many American
citizens as well) that America is not an (Anglo-Protestant) nation (based)-state,
despite the ethnic, religious, and racial ancestry of its founders. Indeed, the
concept of the state (based)-nation helps us understand the only sensible sense
in which Irish, Italian, and Mexican Catholics, Eastern European Jews, South
Asian Hindus, Bosnian Muslims, and a politician who is the son of a black
Muslim man from the Luo people of Western Kenya can truthfully be said to
descend from and embrace the Pilgrims, or the white Protestant “founding fa-
thers” who wrote the charter for the American state, as their own ancestors.
This is not to deny the existence and persistence of an alternative conception,
voicing and defending the view that the United States of America is and ought
to be an Anglo-Protestant nation (based)-state. That conception interprets the
American form of political governance as exceptional because it is thought to
be imbued with the unique or at least distinctive features of one or more of
the primordial Anglo-Protestant founding communities and their distinctive
cultural heritages (although, as David Fischer has argued in his monumental
book Albion’s Seed, those early Anglo-Protestant communities were strikingly
different from each other in their beliefs, values, and social practices). Accord-
ing to that ethnonational conception the well-being of the American state is
dependent upon retention of an Anglo-Protestant majority in the population.
That interpretation is sometimes linked to the assumption that the relevant
Anglo-Protestant cultural heritage cannot be easily exported to other peoples
or other lands.25
That claim about the reason for the supposed nonexportability of the U.S.
form of national identity (binding it to the cultural particularity of Anglo-Prot-
estant primordial communities) should not be confused with the more general
debate about whether the shape of American national identity should be taken
as a global model of success for all political communities. It is quite possible
that the American model does not travel well, but for historical reasons other
than its cultural origins among Anglo-Protestant settlers. The general ques-
Geertz’schallenGe 203
tion of whether there is one ideal form of the state and whether it will flower if
transplanted in diverse climes was famously raised and answered in the negative
by Montesquieu in the eighteenth century and has been debated ever since, al-
though as the political philosopher Michael Walzer has noted in his Tanner
Lecture on Human Values, the question of whether one particular nation (for
example, the ancient Jews ) can be, or should be, “a light” unto all nations has a
very long history.26
In recent years, especially in connection with the war in Iraq, U.S. foreign
policy has been influenced by a positive answer to that general question. For ex-
ample, President George W. Bush speaking on January , , with evangeli-
cal zeal on the occasion of his first State of the Union Address to Congress and
the Nation after the terrorist attacks of September , , delivered one of his
earliest justifications for the project of global nation-building and the spread
of the ideal form of the state as a moral crusade. He spoke with intimations
of the preemptive use of American military and economic force to promote
universal human progress by transplanting one particular form of governance
widely, on the assumption that the ideal form of the state is transferable to all
cultural groups or nations: “America will lead by defending liberty and justice
because they are right and true and unchanging for all people everywhere,”
President Bush declared. “No nation owns these aspirations and no nation is
exempt from them. We have no intention of imposing our culture, but America
will always stand firm for the non-negotiable demands of human dignity, the
rule of law, limits on the power of the state, respect for women, private property,
free speech, equal justice and religious tolerance.”
By way of contrast, when understood as a state (based)-nation rather than a
nation (based)- state, U.S. national identity is essentially defined by an attach-
ment to the liberal democratic constitutional principles underlying the found-
ing of its sovereign governing body, and not by ethnic, racial, or religious ances-
try. And, quite ironically, and remarkably, it is precisely because the American
nation per se is state-based in origin and identity and (is thus) defined by a
shared faith in those constitutional principles, the United States ends up being
a rather special type of multinational state: one in which Americans are able to
retain a sense of national American identity as a political community even as
(with varying degrees of conviction and comfort) they routinely employ those
liberal democratic principles (for example, freedom of association, religion,
204 richarda.shweder
and speech) to make private, factional, separatist, or “splintering” choices in
which they selectively express solidarity and affiliate with members of their own
particular ethnic, racial, religious, or cultural group (for example, in marriage,
residential location, occupational choice, or social life), and thereby perpetuate
the wide range of national heritages distinctive of the rather diverse (real or
imagined) primordial groups residing within the borders of the land. According
to this state-based conception of American national identity, the territory un-
der the sovereign political authority of the U.S. government is not the national
homeland of any particular ethnic, racial, religious, or cultural group (includ-
ing Anglo-Protestants), but is rather a place where the members of each and
every particular ethnic, religious, racial, and cultural group (including Anglo-
Protestants) is at liberty and have the space to feel at home.
The concept of a state (based)-nation described above is similar to the no-
tion of “constitutional patriotism” as discussed by some political theorists, no-
tably by Jan-Werner Muller.27 The concept is often applied to “Europe” (the EU)
as an evolving political community, although it remains to be seen whether the
European state (based)-national identity formation project and the attempt to
weaken or downplay nation (based)-state identities will ultimately be success-
ful. Unlike in the case of the American exception, where the historical origin
of the state went hand in hand with the formation of a state (based)-national
identity, there are significant ethnonational voices within the various already
standing and long ago established nation (based)-states of Europe (for example,
in Ireland, Denmark, or Norway) who continue to have serious doubts about
the desirability of the EU constitutional patriotism project. The issue of Turkish
entry may further heighten ethnonational resistance to the extension of fellow-
feeling at the inclusive transnational level of European national identity. Those
critical of the European constitutional patriotism project might well disparage
it as a New World American transplant of a state (based)-national identity into
the Old World soil of nation (based)-states. On the other hand, the experiment
is didactic and should be useful in learning how best to forge and make viable
a state (based)-national identity that is liberal and pluralistic at the same time
and does not provoke a rebellion among diverse nation-based groups who are
concerned to retain control over and remain at home in their distinctive tradi-
tions and with their language and local way of life.
With regard to New World soil, in effect, the political liberalism that has
Geertz’schallenGe 205
been the blueprint for American state (based)-nationalism makes it possible for
the United States to have a unifying national identity and, at the same time, to
remain a pluralistic multinational state in its own historical memory and col-
lective self-conception (“a land of immigrants” or, somewhat more metaphori-
cally, “a world-federation in miniature”).28 The blueprint contains instructions
that make it possible for every American (including Anglo Protestant-Ameri-
cans) to be a hyphenated American, in a way that is not really possible in a
nation(based)-state such as Denmark or Norway or Saudi Arabia; in Norway,
for example, the dominant indigenous white Lutheran population thinks of
itself as Norwegian pure and simple, and not in hyphenated terms as one group
of Norwegians among many. This plural conception of hyphenated identities
for members of all state-based national groups was probably missing even in
the Ottoman Empire, where the cultural pluralism was robust but nothing like a
widely shared state (based)-national Ottoman identity and sense of a common
political community ever formed (except perhaps among the sultan and the
ruling elite, who were themselves ethnically diverse, and socially diverse—many
were former slaves—in their origins).29 Indeed, it is precisely because American
national identity permits everyone the expressive liberty (in both private and
public spaces) to be a hyphenated American, and hence permits every Ameri-
can to belong to more than just the American state (based)-nation, that what it
means to be an American can be a unifying identity and has patriotic appeal.30
The following historical example from a note of appreciation, dated Septem-
ber , , sent by Thomas Jefferson to Rabbi Jacob de la Motta, is illustrative
of this exceptional (and somewhat ironic) way of thinking about a unifying
national identity, and its appeal. Jefferson was in receipt of a copy of the rabbi’s
sermon, delivered on the occasion of the consecration of the first synagogue
in Savannah, Georgia. In his response he wrote, “Thomas Jefferson returns his
thanks to Dr. de la Motta for the eloquent discourses on the Consecration of
the Synagogue of Savannah which he has been so kind as to send him. It excites
in him the gratifying reflection that his own country has been the first to prove
to the world two truths, the most salutary to human society, that man can gov-
ern himself, and that religious freedom is the most effectual anodyne against
religious dissension: the maxim of civil government being reversed in that of
religion, where its true form is ‘divided we stand, united we fall.’”31
More recently, Supreme Court Justice William O. Douglas, a political liberal,
206 richarda.shweder
described the core defining feature of American national identity as follows:
“The melting pot[32] is not designed to homogenize people, making them uni-
form in consistency. The melting pot as I understand it is a figure of speech
that depicts the wide diversities tolerated by the First Amendment under one
flag.”33 That depiction of a distinctive type of national identity associated with
the American experience (and symbolized by its flag) is one with regard to
which Clifford Geertz surely would have felt considerable sympathy, although
it is not out of the question (here I am just speculating) that Geertz might have
wondered (as I do) about alternative interpretations of the actual historical use
of “the melting pot” as a figure of speech for American national identity—for
example, as a “meltdown” of diverse peoples (a metaphor for cultural assimila-
tion that might be quite suitable as an expression of national identity in a nation
[based]-state such as Denmark) rather than as a large pot with plenty of space
for the distinctive heritages of many primordial groups (a metaphor for cultural
and religious freedom that, as Justice Douglas suggests, is suitable as an expres-
sion of national identity in a state [based]-nation such as the United States).
Predicting the Shape of the New World Order34
Contemporary prophecies about the future of the New World Order are
usually predictions about the consequences of a process called “globalization”
for human betterment and for the future of the various nations, nation (based)-
states and multinational states (including empires) of the world. Typically, in
discussions of globalization, the idea of human betterment is equated (some-
what narrowly in the spirit of economics) with global increases in aggregate
human wealth and with the worldwide establishment of wealth-producing
efficiencies in the division of expertise and labor across and within nations
and states.35 Among globalization theorists questions about the consequences
of globalization for the future of the existing nations of the world are usu-
ally about their capacity to reproduce themselves and perpetuate their cultural
heritage and way of life. Questions about the future of the existing states of the
world are usually about the manner and degree to which such states will, or
should be allowed to, retain their sovereignty and govern their citizens free of
external interference or international regulation.
The process itself, called globalization, is an accordion-like concept. There
Geertz’schallenGe 207
are both narrow and expansive conceptions of the character of globalization.
The predicted consequences of the process for nations and states, and hence for
the shape of the New World Order, vary accordingly.
Globalization in the New World Order
The narrow definition of globalization refers to the linking of the world’s lo-
cal economies (for example, free trade and market exchange bringing together
members of distinct nations and states) with the aim of promoting overall hu-
man betterment. This narrow “free trade and exchange” conception of global-
ization is quite compatible with the liberty of peoples to carry forward and
socially reproduce their distinctive way of life, and to do so by means of pri-
mordial bonds of community based on ancestry, ethnicity, race, religion, or cul-
ture. Despite Voltaire’s ironic Enlightenment contempt for religion and cultural
tradition, one of his caricatures might be read to suggest that the basic pursuit
of wealth in a free marketplace (in his example, in the London Exchange in the
early days of modern capitalism) actually promotes attitudes of harmonious
sufferance between ideologically antagonistic and self-perpetuating Herder-like
cultural communities (or nations).
To wit, Voltaire wrote: “Although the Episcopalian and the Presbyterian are
the two main sects in Great Britain, all the others are welcome and live quite
well together, while most of their preachers detest each other with about as
much cordiality as a Jansenist damns a Jesuit. Come into the London Exchange,
a place more respectable than many a court. You will see assembled representa-
tives of every nation for the benefit of mankind. Here the Jew, the Mohametan
and the Christian deal with one another as if they were of the same religion, and
reserve the name “infidel” for those who go bankrupt. Here the Presbyterian
puts his trust in the Anabaptist, and the Anglican accepts the Quaker’s prom-
issory note. Upon leaving these peaceful and free assemblies, one goes to the
synagogue, the other for a drink; yet another goes to have himself baptized in a
large tub in the name of the Father through the Son to the Holy Ghost; another
has his son’s foreskin cut off, and over the infant he has muttered some Hebrew
words that he doesn’t understand at all: Some others go to their church to await
divine inspiration with their hat on their head. And all are content.”36
In other words, limited free trade at the borders or frontiers where mem-
208 richarda.shweder
bers of different groups make contact with each other and mutually benefit
from the exchange because of each other’s comparative advantages (the logic of
comparative advantage is the core logic of narrow definitions of globalization)
is not incompatible with a stable equilibrium of ideological differences among
“primordial” groups.
Hidden, however, within the apparently narrow definition of globalization
is a more expansive idea of the various ways that nations and states ought to
transform their economies, polities, ideologies, and loyalties if they want to
be recognized or accepted as players in an aggregate wealth-producing global
capitalist economy. Thus, while the narrow idea of globalization begins with
open entry to the market, the elimination of tariffs, and the free trade of ma-
terial goods across borders, it readily expands also to include the free flow of
capital and labor. This more expansive conception of globalization goes beyond
contact at the borders (or in the commodities exchange) and calls for a much
deeper penetration into the social and cultural hearts of the various free trading
“primordial” groups.
Indeed, guided by the aim of expanding free markets and keeping them
efficient in their wealth-production capacity a far-flung economic, legal, and
political order gets imagined by expansive globalization theorists. It consists
of international legislative and regulatory organizations (the IMF, the World
Bank, the WTO, perhaps a World Court, or even a World Parliament with a
global constitution), corporations with a global reach managed and staffed by
citizens from diverse nations and states, and states whose borders have been
opened to capital, goods, and labor from all over the world. According to this
normative vision of a “neoliberal” or “borderless” capitalism, goods, capital, and
labor ought to be freely marketed on a worldwide scale for the sake of global
prosperity. In the minds of those who adopt such a perspective, nation (based)-
states, ancestral homelands, and bonds of solidarity based on religion, ethnicity,
race, language, or shared cultural heritage are potential barriers to the globaliza-
tion project, especially if they result in restrictions on residence, affiliation, and
trade, or lead to economically costly preferences for in-group over out-group
members (for example, buying the same product, or even an inferior version of
the product, at a higher price, if it is locally produced or produced by in-group
members); which is one reason liberal globalization theorists sometimes dis-
parage ethnonationalism as separatist, illiberal, and retrograde.
Geertz’schallenGe 209
There is an even more expansive idea of globalization. Here the concept is
extended to reach beyond just the removal of all barriers to trade, foreign in-
vestment, and the opening of borders to migrant labor. The idea gets linked to
demands for “structural adjustments” of lagging economies and even for moral
adjustments in the content of lagging cultural heritages as well. The structural
adjustments usually begin with the firing of an overemployed civil service and
the reorganization of economic life to reduce imports and increase exports
(ironically, in many countries this means promoting cultural tourism, and put-
ting the local cultural heritage on commercial display, since there is little else
to export), all with the aim of accumulating foreign exchange that can then be
invested in the pursuit of further wealth. This is ironic, of course, because the
local cultural traditions that are put on display for the sake of attracting tourists
and accumulating foreign financial capital are the very cultural traditions that
are often viewed as backward, superstitious, or primitive by Westernized elites
in the less wealthy countries of the world; yet from the point of view of identify-
ing local traditions that enhance the aggregate wealth-production project they
are indeed a form of “cultural capital,” even if their value is dependent on the
curiosity of, and desire for travel, adventure, and exotic experiences by, visitors
from the most wealthy countries of the world.
There may also be structural adjustments in the direction of Western ways
of running banks, enforcing contracts, paying off debts, and settling disputes.
Transparency and the elimination of corruption are key objectives in this struc-
tural adjustment process. Ultimately the ideal is to model your economy and
your political community (including your legal institutions) following the ex-
ample of the richest countries in the Western world. Such adjustments may be
entered into voluntarily so to encourage foreign investment, or they may be
mandated (for example, by the World Bank) as necessary conditions for secur-
ing low-interest loans.
In its broadest form globalization thus ceases to be just an economic concept
with political and legal entanglements and consequences and comes to imply
the free flow of everything, including cultural heritage. Typically, however, the
flows turn out to be asymmetrical (because when it comes to relations between
nations’ and states’ power, prestige and wealth are asymmetrical); and, in prac-
tice and in fact, the international or global system calls for greater linguistic,
social, cultural, aesthetic, and intellectual adjustments for some players than for
210 richarda.shweder
others (so that, for example, if English becomes the language of global capital-
ism the adjustments are far easier for the cosmopolitan elites of former British
colonies, including the citizens of the United States and Canada).
When fully expanded the idea of globalization becomes a somewhat immod-
est hypothesis about human nature and an imperial call for “enlightened” moral
interventions into other ways of life in order to free them of their supposedly
barbaric, superstitious, or irrational (that is, economically counterproductive)
cultural heritages. This unabashed and fully expanded globalization hypothesis
makes three related claims: () that for the sake of human betterment (that is,
aggregate wealth accumulation) Westernlike aspirations, tastes, and ideas about
what is true, good, beautiful, and efficient are objectively the best aspirations,
tastes, and ideas in the world; () that Westernlike aspirations, tastes, and ideas
will be fired up or freed up by economic globalization and the pursuit of wealth;
and () that the world will/already has or ought to become Westernized so as to
become maximally rich.
Westernlike aspirations include the desire for liberal democracy, free enter-
prise, private property, autonomy, individualism, equality, and the protection
of natural or universal rights (the contemporary human rights movement is in
many ways an extension of an expansive globalization movement). Westernlike
ideas include the particular conceptions of gender identity, sexuality, a “normal”
body, work, reproductive health, and family life embraced by liberal men and
women in the United States today. They include a heavy dose of the “Protestant
Ethic” (now viewed as a universal moral ideal in the age of globalization), which
suggests that more is better and that you are not really good if you are not really
rich. Westernlike ideas also include the fundamentally liberal notion that all
social distinctions based on primordial collective identities (ethnicity, religion,
gender) are invidious. They include as well the notion that individuals should
transcend their tradition-bound commitments and experience the quality of
their lives solely in secular and ecumenical terms—for example, as measured by
health, wealth, or years of life. Westernlike tastes include a preference for CNN,
VISA cards, the Internet, iphones, and, of course, English as the language of
global capitalism. That expansive conception of globalization thus imagines a
very deep penetration into the social, legal, and cultural corpus of any aggregate
human wealth-producing nation playing in the globally integrated economic
game.
Geertz’schallenGe 211
Here one once again comes face to face with Geertz’s challenge. Is aggre-
gate human wealth production compatible with the preservation of primordial
communities and the continuation of their ways of life? Can the processes of
economic integration and cultural division be reconciled, and if so how? What
shape will the New World Order assume? Here we move into the realm of politi-
cal and cultural prophesy.
Prophecy One: The Expansive View: Globalizing the Western Civilization Ideal
November , , is the day the Berlin Wall came tumbling down and the
Cold War balance of power shifted dramatically in favor of the world’s leading
example of a multinational state (based)-nation, the United States. If you had
kept your ear to the ground in those heady days you would have repeatedly
heard one particular kind of prophecy about the shape of the New World Order
that was expected to emerge to replace the old tripartite “First World” (capitalist
world)/“Second World” (communist world)/“Third World” (underdeveloped
world) classification of nations and states. It was prophecy premised on an ex-
pansive view of globalization.
The prediction went like this: “What we may be witnessing is not just the
end of the Cold War, or the passing of a particular period of post-war history,
but the end of history as such: that is, the end point of mankind’s ideological
evolution and the universalization of Western liberal democracy as the final
form of human government.”37 That was perhaps the most common augury
about the New World Order during the s, the “Washington consensus,”
and it remains a very popular expectation today, even as current world tensions
between “West” and “East” and between various liberal democratic states and
more autocratic or theocratic states have led a political realist such as Robert
Kagan to title his recent book The Return of History and the End of Dreams.38
For many prognosticators, especially those who were either triumphant
Americans or foreign admirers of the United States, that type of “the West is
best and is going to take over the world” augury was really a thinly veiled expres-
sion of their assumption that the American way of life is best and should, and
will, be universalized. The notion that we had possibly reached “an end point to
mankind’s ideological evolution” expressed their expectation of a global con-
212 richarda.shweder
vergence of beliefs, values, and social practices in the direction of the American
standard. And that expectation condensed and articulated a view dating to at
least such eighteenth-century Enlightenment figures as Voltaire and Condorcet
that the history of the world marches in the direction of an ideal universal
civilization; and that at any moment one nation-state (perhaps England in the
nineteenth century), and then another (perhaps America in the second half of
the twentieth century), comes closest to realizing that progressive goal (“end”)
of history.39
In its most triumphal form the prediction amounted to the claim that Amer-
ican civilization is the greatest flowering or most fully realized expression of
the only true global civilization; and that American cultural designs for social,
political, legal, economic, and family life (and for gender equality and the rais-
ing and education of children as citizens in a liberal polity) are so superior that
they will be recognized as such and will diffuse over the entire globe. In some
(slightly less conclusive) versions of the triumphal forecast the global diffusion
of the American way of life gets pictured as a transitional or penultimate stage
in the development of an advanced global political community uniting a world
of liberated individuals (liberated from all primordial bonds, constraints, and
attachments) under a sovereign global successor regime for the enforcement
of universal human rights that will then truly signal the end of history and the
apotheosis of the Western Enlightenment. The augury thus gives expression to
a long-standing imperial liberal ideal: the dream of cosmopolitan citizenship
without parochial nation-based loyalties in a world governed by universal or
uniform laws, norms, and institutions enforced by a sovereign nationless politi-
cal entity.
In a sense this is the American state (based)-nation conception of national
identity projected onto a global scale, but without the hyphens connecting a
person to other more primordial identities. It is an ecumenical (and antiparo-
chial) ideal that liberal secular humanists and many human rights activists have
found appealing and associate with the very idea of modernity. Perhaps it is a
vision of that sort that inspires the very idea of “law without nations.” Perhaps
it is the vision that inspired John Lennon, the song writer and former “Beatle,”
to write his famous utopian ballet “Imagine,” the lyrics of which might well
have precipitated a nightmare in the dream life of Johann Herder. The tune of
the song can’t be sung in a written essay (although it is very appealing—and
Geertz’schallenGe 213
catching), but notice the words in the song, in which John Lennon imagines,
with approbation, that there are no countries, no religion, and nothing to live
and die for.40
Narratives of the Enlightenment: Three Revealing Conferences
Here I would like to pause for a moment to more concretely illustrate the
character of various “The West Is Best and Will Take Over the World” prog-
nostications. For starters consider the events at two World Bank meetings I at-
tended toward the end of the last millennium, the first called “Culture Counts”
(held in October ) and the second on the topic of gender and justice in
Africa (held in May ).41
“Culture Counts” was a large international gathering held in Florence, Italy.
It included talks by ministers of finance or culture or education from around
the globe, and the president of the World Bank. Hillary Clinton was on the pro-
gram. But the real highlight was the plenary academic session, which featured
a keynote address by a prominent American economic historian. Given that
the millennium was fast approaching, he reported on the last thousand years
of what he presumed to be the universal race among nations to be successful
(by which he meant to become as rich as possible); and he explained why the
primordial national inheritance (read “cultural inheritance”) of a people makes
all the difference for whether a territory is rich or poor. China was probably
leading the race a thousand years ago, he supposed, but they inherited too many
xenophobic beliefs from their ancestors and didn’t want to trade with outsiders.
So the Chinese fell behind and didn’t get a ship to the Atlantic Ocean until well
into the nineteenth century.
The keynote speaker then took the audience on an economic and cultural
tour of the rest of the world. Culture counts everywhere, he said. In Latin
America they have this attitude called machismo; so Latin men think they are
little princes and don’t want to work. In Africa, okay, yes, the physical environ-
ment is not very good, but they fight with each other all the time and they beat
their wives. And then there is Southern Europe and Catholicism. The Catholic
Church turned against Galileo and science. So Southern Europeans fell into
ignorance and superstition. But now we have reached the year . Look
214 richarda.shweder
around! North Americans and Northern Europeans have won the race, and
for good cultural reasons, the American exclaimed. Even before he could fully
deliver his take-home message (Get with the progressive program: Westernize
your culture, model yourself after us, or remain poor!) the Chinese delegate to
the meeting had walked out of the room.
The second meeting, on gender and justice in Africa, was held at World Bank
central in Washington, DC, with occasional satellite links to audiences in six
African countries. A prominent Western liberal feminist, who believed that the
ideal of progressive social evolution and the end of history requires the sisters
of the world to transcend their primordial ethnic group identities and reli-
gious and national attachments and unite in opposition to a loathsome and
oppressive universal patriarchy, delivered the following message to a predomi-
nately African female audience. Stop complaining about colonialism, she said.
African traditions and customs were bad for women long before colonialism
came along. She then invoked a sensational literary account of wife beating.
As it turned out, the “sisters” in the audience were mainly united in opposi-
tion to what they perceived as the speaker’s Anglo-Protestant neocolonial at-
titudes, and all-too-familiar and high-minded first world missionary zeal. They
certainly had some complaints about their men. But they still viewed them as
members of the family and generally felt at home with them in their distinc-
tive national traditions. And they actually thought African females were pretty
powerful, in their own way.
But the meeting that was most revealing of the type of story I have in mind—
of history ending with the apotheosis of the beliefs, values, and practices of a
universal Western civilization—was the one held in April of at the house
of the American Academy in Cambridge, sponsored by Harvard University’s
Academy for International and Area studies, and organized by Lawrence Har-
rison and Samuel Huntington. A notable theme at that meeting was the gen-
eral equation of progress and goodness with Anglo-Protestant values. One of
the organizers suggested that successful Protestant missionary efforts in Latin
America might enhance economic growth, with the implication that the more
Catholics who are converted to Northern European ways the better. Others ar-
gued that Jews and overseas Chinese are good for the economy too, especially if
they behave like Protestants. Or at least subscribe to some version of the Prot-
Geertz’schallenGe 215
estant ethical law that only those who accumulate wealth have been chosen by
God to be saved.
The most dominant theme of the meeting, however, was the emphasis on
progressive national development, so as to make the world a better place. Hence
there was a good deal of discussion of what might be called the imperial Anglo-
Protestant civilizing project. The project is aimed at establishing that the West
(or at least its Northern-most sectors) is best, and at improving the rest of the
world through exposure to Northern European and American values, beliefs,
and customs. It would appear to be a sign of the times that the conference
publication (a book called Culture Matters: How Values Shape Human Progress)
became a media event. The book was reviewed in the Wall Street Journal and
Time magazine and discussed in the New York Times and the Atlantic Monthly.
For a short time it was one of the top best-selling books at Amazon.com, a
stunning achievement for an edited academic volume.
I was invited to the “Culture Matters” conference to fill the role of a des-
ignated skeptic. And to some extent I played that part. But there were other,
quite unanticipated thoughts on my mind during those days in the house of the
American Academy. I found myself asking, Is this how the famous Franz Boas
(the founder of American anthropology) and other robust cultural pluralists
felt one hundred years ago debating with liberal progressive European Enlight-
enment inspired cultural evolutionary theorists in an earlier heyday of Western
initiated globalization (roughly to )? I found myself wondering, What
happened to the robust cultural pluralism message of Anthropology ? In
other words, I came face to face with the utter failure of my own discipline of
anthropology to accomplish its most basic mission, to raise the awareness of
social scientists, policy analysts, and the public at large to the virtue in the di-
versity of nations and to the hazards of any universal civilization ideal, whether
it is Christian, Muslim, or secular in its ideological origins. And I found myself
acutely aware of the responsibility of anthropologists, political philosophers,
and globalization theorists to take up Geertz’s challenge and once again de-
velop and promote a conception of the relationship between a cultural com-
munity and a political community that might be useful in minimizing some
of the risks associated with the problem of “primordial” group differences and
with multinational life in a global and migratory world.
216 richarda.shweder
Prophecy Two: The Nation (Based)-State Model Projected on a Global Scale: Civilizations Are Local, Not Universal
As far as I know the true connection between globalization narrowly con-
ceived (as free trade) and globalization expansively conceived (Western values,
culture, and institutions taking over the world) has yet to be firmly established.
It is quite possible that other cultures and civilizations do not need to become
just like the United States to materially benefit from participation in an emer-
gent narrowly conceptualized global economy. Modern technologies (for ex-
ample, television, cell phones, computers, weapons) and economic institutions
(for example, private property) seem to have effectively served many interests,
including the interests of primordial communitarians and religious fundamen-
talists all over the world.42 It is also quite possible that even a genuinely success-
ful narrowly conceived global economy will not emerge, or will fail to sustain
itself, or that efforts to expansively globalize values, beliefs, and cultural prac-
tices will be effectively resisted (in some cases for very good reasons), or that the
world will go to war. That is how the last big push to globalize the world came
to an end, with World War I.
And, of course what really happened when the Berlin Wall went tumbling
down in was that the boundaries of the former Soviet multinational em-
pire began to dissolve, just as other empires have from time to time over the
course of history splintered, fractured, or given up their sovereignty over one
or more of the nations within their territorial realm. Speaking both metaphori-
cally and literally, the flattening of that particular barrier unleashed a process
in which diverse ethnic, racial, and religious satellite, vassal, and tributary re-
gions under ethnic Russian hegemony or suzerainty (for example, the various
nations in the Balkans and in the former Yugoslavia) began to seek autonomy
as self-governing nation (based)-states; and in some instances those ethnon-
ational movements engaged in violent conflict to achieve their aims. The result,
which amounted to the construction of new nation-state territorial boundaries
defined by culture, ethnicity, language, religion, or race, was not entirely antici-
pated or properly understood, although, given the role of the ethnonationalist
impulse in the historical formation of modern nation-states all over modern
Europe, Asia, and Africa, it should have been. Despite the popularity of end
of history prognostications in the s and the global projection of a coming
Geertz’schallenGe 217
universal Western (more specifically American) civilization, augury turned out
to be a very hazardous business, and the past twenty years have proved to be
pretty baffling times. The ethnonational impulse is not necessarily pro-Ameri-
can. History has not come to an end, and ideological differences have not disap-
peared or converged on any single global standard. Instead history seems to be
repeating itself, although there is debate about what precisely that recurrence
might amount to.
Hence, alongside the prediction of the apotheosis of a universal civilization
and the end of national differences one finds the opposite augury. It predicts the
apotheosis of robust cultural pluralism and the triumph of the ethnonational-
ist separatist project not only in Europe (where as Muller argued it has already
triumphed) but on a global scale; with ideological differences expressed not
just at the level of nation-states but also at the more macrolevel of regional
civilizations. The second augury thus envisions the return (or continuation) of
an ideologically divided world partitioned into either regional civilizations or
perhaps individual nation (based)-states that compete and cooperate with each
other while retaining their distinct cultural identities and corresponding forms
of political organization (democratic, oligarchic, monarchic; liberal, autocratic,
theocratic). It is a model of a robust, culturally plural international system de-
void of any (domestically) multinational states; in other words, it envisions
cultural diversity across states (or regions) and cultural homogeneity within
states (or regions).
Not surprisingly ethnonationalists love this image of the New World Order.
In the s I had a Sudanese student who did his Ph.D. on attitudes toward
modernization among African graduate students at the University of Chicago,
using a beliefs and values questionnaire inspired by the modernization research
of the sociologist Alex Inkeles. The Sudanese student discovered that the “mate-
rialism” factor in his questionnaire was orthogonal to the “individualism” fac-
tor; one could value wealth accumulation without giving up one’s primordial
attachments or commitments and loyalty to the tribe. The Saudi Arabian ruling
elite liked that message so much they hired him to teach in their universities.
Perhaps that is why Samuel Huntington’s thesis that the West is unique, but not
universal, and that other nation-states and civilizations do not need to become
Americans to benefit from globalization and the technologies of the modern
world, is so popular in the non-Western world.43 I think we have to take this
218 richarda.shweder
second prophecy very seriously, especially with regard to its expectation that
globalization and human betterment can (and will) occur without the neces-
sity of a deep penetration of cultural heritages from the West. Nevertheless, by
the lights of this vision, diverse national communities, and even whole civiliza-
tions, are encouraged to remain domestically mononational so as to preserve
their distinctive traditions while everyone gets a piece of the pie. It is the ideal
of “when in Rome do as the Romans do” and “separate but equal” on a global
scale.44
Prophecy 3: The Return of Multinational Empire, But (One Hopes) a Liberal One45
A third and final prophecy concerning the shape of the New World order
predicts the return of multinational empire, although this time on a truly global
scale. It anticipates the formation of a global multinational empire managed by
cosmopolitan elites from all over the globe whose primordial origins are less
important than their sense of identity with the liberal constitutional principles
underlying the blueprint for the global empire. This augury rejects the common
assumption that an empire is an outmoded or premodern form of political
community, a thing of the past. It rejects as well the assumption that a postmod-
ern multinational empire must be illiberal in its approach to the development
of individuals and “primordial” groups.
Indeed, this third augury begins with the observation that something very
much like a global multinational empire (governed by cosmopolitan elites who
have detached themselves from their primordial roots) is already in sight on the
international scene; what still remains to be worked out is the precise character
and scope of the empire’s liberality. The governing elites of this emerging global
multinational empire currently seem divided: between those (for example, at
the IMF or WTO or at meetings of the twenty wealthiest countries of the world)
who are most dedicated to the pursuit of aggregate global wealth, which of-
ten means the implementation of a more expansive view of globalization and
the liberation of individuals from the inherited traditions of their primordial
groups, and those (for example, at the UN or the World Bank or at numerous
NGOs) who are most dedicated to the pursuit of some form or another of social
equality and global justice; which also often means the implementation of a
Geertz’schallenGe 219
more expansive view of globalization and the liberation of individuals from the
inherited traditions of their primordial groups.
Nevertheless this third augury predicts that, over time and in order to sur-
vive as an economically viable and just empire, the empire will have to accom-
modate itself to the reality of robust cultural pluralism on a global scale, or
else risk dissolving into a balkanized world of hostile nation (based)-states.
Assuming that necessity truly is the mother of invention, this means that the
ruling elite of the emerging liberal global multinational empire will takes steps
to protect both the liberty of peoples to perpetuate their way of life and the
liberty of individuals to be at home in their own distinct cultural traditions, or
exit from them if they so choose. Imagined in this third augury is the evolution
of a mixed model of global governance, combining some of the features of the
multinational Ottoman Empire (for example, local control by diverse nations
over their own parochial customs) with some of the features of state (based)-
nationalism in the United States (for example, a state [based] sense of national
identity compatible with a hyphenated cosmopolitan identity). It is a model for
liberal global governance in which there is plenty of legal room and de facto
space for cultural diversity.
As Geertz observed, robust cultural pluralism is not just an obdurate fact
of life; it can also be the mother of liberal invention. If the history of human
reflection on the experience of living in groups has taught us anything it is that
diverse nations based on socially reproduced differences in beliefs, values, and
related social practices are unavoidable features of human social life; and that
it is both tyrannical and unwise for rulers or governments to try to coercively
engineer a multinational society into a uniform shape. Instructive in this regard
is James Madison’s famous treatise concerning diverse factions in American so-
ciety (in Federalist , originally published on November , , in the Daily
Advertiser): a faction, according to Madison’s formulation, being a subgroup of
the total population of some macropolitical community, whether in the majority
or in the minority, who are bound to each other by some shared interests, values,
opinions, passions, or historical identity that sets them in contrast to the inter-
ests, values, opinions, passions, or historical identity of some other subgroup.
Consider, for example, Madison’s observations about the connection be-
tween faction formation and the liberal value of liberty or autonomy. He writes:
“There are two methods of removing the causes of faction: the one, by destroy-
220 richarda.shweder
ing the liberty which is essential to its existence; the other, by giving to every
citizen the same opinions, the same passions, and the same interests. It could
never be more truly said than of the first remedy, that it was worse than the
disease. Liberty is to faction what air is to fire, an aliment without which it
instantly expires. But it could not be less folly to abolish liberty, which is es-
sential to political life, because it nourishes faction, than it would be to wish the
annihilation of air, which is essential to animal life, because it imparts to fire its
destructive agency. The second expedient is as impracticable as the first would
be unwise. As long as the reason of man continues fallible, and he is at liberty to
exercise it, different opinions will be formed. As long as the connection subsists
between his reason and his self-love, his opinions and his passions will have a
reciprocal influence on each other; and the former will be objects to which the
latter will attach themselves.”
In other words, in the absence of tyranny and in the presence human fal-
libility populations will naturally diversify over historical time; distinguishable
national identities will form; and in the face of such diversity, whether global
or domestic, wise rulers and wise states would do well to embrace Thomas
Jefferson’s ironic maxim “Divided We Stand, United We Fall.” They would do
well to figure out which dividing lines work (and should be defended) and
which don’t, for the sake of peace, order, and human betterment.
Thus, all successful empires must come to terms with a fundamental prob-
lem of empire governance—the problem of how to exercise one’s sovereignty
under conditions where there are deep disagreements among members of dif-
ferent communities within the empire about how sovereign state power should
be exercised (deep enough to motivate collective resistance or civil unrest if
the ruling elite try to penetrate too deeply into the way of life of a primordial
group). Wise empires are adaptive enough to hold themselves together for long
periods of time without relying on brute force and without a devastating loss
of life, territory, and treasure. They learn to operate more or less as de facto
federations; they try to avoid the many costs associated with forcefully imposing
one’s will on others. In and through various failed and successful attempts to
govern from the top or the center they come to understand some of the virtues
of decentralization, indirect rule, and divided sovereignty.46 In other words they
come to appreciate not just the obdurate reality of cultural pluralism but also
the liberal ideology of political pluralism.
Geertz’schallenGe 221
The Ideology of Political Pluralism
Allow me to begin to conclude this engagement with “Geertz’s Challenge” by
suggesting that political pluralism is a liberal political ideology well suited to ro-
bust cultural pluralism and multinational states ranging from the United States
to the Ottoman Empire. The ideology is expressed by the political philosopher
Hannah Arendt when she described a distinctive feature of the American po-
litical community this way: “In contradistinction to the classical principles of
the European nation-state that power, like sovereignty, is indivisible, the power
structure of this country rests on the principle of division of power and on the
conviction that the body politic as a whole is strengthened by the division of
power.”47 William Galston, the political philosopher, describes a related “po-
litical pluralism” principle, which he also refers to as the theory of “multiple
sovereignties,” and which he associates with the writings of the British political
theorists Harold Laski, J. N. Figgis, and G. D. H. Cole and their critique of the
European “plenipotentiary state.” The basic idea, as noted by Galston, is that
“our social life comprises multiple sources of authority and sovereignty—indi-
viduals, parents, associations, churches, and state institutions, among others—
no one of which is dominant for all purposes and on all occasions. Nonstate au-
thority does not exist simply as a concession or gift of the state. A well-ordered
state recognizes, but does not create, other sources of authority.”48
The ideology of political pluralism places a great emphasis on freedom of as-
sociation (and the implied freedom to dissociate from others) as a fundamental
right. The ideology makes the Herder-like assumption that fellow feeling for
members of one’s kind “is a basic human need no less natural than that for
food or drink or security or procreation.” It assumes that in-groups and local
associations (including those based on real or imagined primordial ties to an-
cestral groups) that are independent of the government are not only natural to
human beings but an essential condition for the flourishing of the social life of
a political community. As Hannah Arendt emphasizes, a political community
becomes totalitarian when all natural groupings, private associations, and pri-
mordial bonds of society are brought under state control and thought to exist
only to the extent that they are given permission to exist or are licensed by the
state. As the sociologist Paul Hirst makes note in his introduction to the selected
writings of Cole, Figgis, and Laski: “The English pluralists challenged the theory
222 richarda.shweder
of unlimited state sovereignty and of a unified centralized state embodying such
sovereign power in a hierarchy of authority.”49
One implication of political pluralism is that a despotism based on the will of
the majority (the mob) is not much better than a divinely based despotism. Alter-
natively stated, the autonomy of local in-groups is threatened not only by theoc-
racies claiming unlimited, central, and omnicompetent ruling powers but also by
national assemblies based on majority rule and the absolute sovereignty of “the
people.” When “the people” think of themselves as sovereign and also act that way,
neither the dead nor the unborn have a vote and the (real and imagined) primor-
dial ties that bind the present to the historical ethical community are dissolved.
J. N. Figgis in particular tried to develop a theory of political pluralism designed
to preserve the authority of autonomous associations (religious organizations,
clubs, and trade associations) against internal regulation by external legislative
bodies; by the lights of Figgis’s normative version of political pluralism, the role
of the state should be restricted to the supervision of the interactions between
diverse local self-regulating bodies. It is not too much of an imaginative stretch
to suggest that in these theories of political pluralism one finds a liberal political
ideology based on principles of divided sovereignty, limited government, and the
dispersion of power, an ideology well suited to the evolution of a liberal global
multinational empire, as anticipated by prophecy #.
A Cautious Ottomanism and Prophesy #3
Prophesy # imagines a global empire managed by ruling elites who are wise
enough to leave plenty of space for the diversity of nations—and wise enough to
ponder the Ottoman example, fully cautious and mindful of the caveats noted
earlier. Recall that the Ottoman Empire lasted much longer than the British
Empire. The Ottoman elite had a brilliant strategy (an arguably liberal principle
focused on the liberty of peoples) for maintaining peaceful coexistence among
the many primordial communities (those twenty-two “races”) who resided
within their multinational state. Under the Ottomans the so-called millet was
a term used to designate a community entitled to a good deal of deference and
to semiautonomy in the administration of the affairs of its members.50 This is
one reason that the expression “Ottomanism” has come to mean a federation
of semiautonomous millets, where membership in a millet is typically defined
Geertz’schallenGe 223
by language, religion, and ethnic history; and where one’s personal identity and
sense of self-(efficacy, expressiveness, esteem) is part and parcel of being rec-
ognized as a Serb or an Arab or a Jew (or a Bulgar, or a Lebanese Christian, or
a Greek, or a Sunni Turk, and so forth). Thinking through the Ottoman case,
selectively and mindful of those caveats mentioned earlier, it is also not hard to
imagine additional and rather more cosmopolitan millets (Cairo, Damascus)
populated by relatively rootless or rebellious exiles who might have voluntarily
exited (or been banished) from the various local territories where primordial
ties and a customary heritage defined one’s identity and way of life.
Thus, “Ottomanism,” as I use the term, is meant to connote a relatively de-
centralized form of political administration in the Ottoman multinational state;
where for example, the Mosul millet was internally administered by the Kurds,
the Basra millet internally administered by the Shiites, and the Baghdad millet
internally administered by the Sunnis, and the relatively nonintrusive Sunni
sultans stayed away or were kept at a distance.
Indeed, the contemporary state of Iraq is a case in point. For “Ottoman-
ism” was the model for the way the ruling elite of the empire organized their
relations with the diverse peoples who lived in the territories that were subse-
quently (in the “modern” post–Ottoman Empire era) arbitrarily amalgamated
by the European nation (based)-states into a single sovereign state, which for
many years after World War I was dominated by a minority Sunni Muslim na-
tion that viewed “Iraq” as their own nation (based)-state. More recently those
arbitrarily amalgamated territories (the three former millets of the multina-
tional Ottoman Empire) were invaded by the United States on the assumption
that the American state (based)-nation model of national identity and political
community could be transplanted onto almost any foreign soil. Under the ear-
lier Ottoman model there was no Iraqi state but rather a decentralized form of
indirect rule with local self-determination by primordial groups and with no
demand by the Ottoman elite for a deep spiritual allegiance to the central figure
of the Sunni sultan.
This decentralized federal form of organization, which is protective of the
distinctive ways of life of diverse nations, is captured by the historian Caro-
line Finkel in her book Osman’s Dream: The Story of the Ottoman Empire from
–. There she notes how the eventual territorial dismemberment of the
Ottoman Empire upset the nineteenth century’s relatively peaceful modus vi-
224 richarda.shweder
vendi . Different groups—Serbs, Bulgars, and others—broke away and sought
their own nation (based)- states. And she makes the following revealing (and
quite remarkable) observation: “Ottoman Jews subscribed to the idea of ‘Ot-
tomanism’ for longer, continuing to hold prominent positions in the CUP (the
Young Turk Party) even after the revolution. In the early years of the cen-
tury about half of all Ottoman Jews lived in Thessalonica—where many had
settled after their expulsion from Spain and Portugal at the end of the fifteenth
century; they had shown little interest in Zionist efforts to establish a Jewish
homeland in Palestine during the reign of Abdulhamid, and few chose to go
there when Thessalonica was lost to Greece in , migrating instead to France,
Britain, Egypt, Brazil, South Africa and the United States. Following the
revolution, a branch of the World Zionist Organization was established in Is-
tanbul . . . . [Many Zionists] . . . saw a homeland within the Ottoman Empire as
the best guarantee of their security.”51
The Ottoman multinational state was thus a politically plural polity domes-
tically arranged to discourage the temptation to proselytize or universalize one’s
beliefs, values, and social norms or impose them on others. Instead, the empire
made room and gave lots of real space for cultural pluralism. Under the Ot-
tomans each group had control of its own local territory. Each was at liberty
to carry forward its distinctive way of life, including its religious beliefs, and
family and social life norms; while the ruling elite collected taxes and tried to
garrison its policing forces so as to keep the boundaries of each of the millets
secure. Hence this last augury or speculation about the future of a New World
Order imagines a global system—a truly liberal empire on a global scale—that
leaves plenty of room for diverse (and even illiberal) ways of life and consists
of semiautonomous milletlike “primordial” political communities with limited
sovereignty over their internal affairs (for example, the current nation [based]-
states of the world) and managed by a international class of cosmopolitan citi-
zens of the world.
Prophecy # thus imagines a world order that is politically liberal in the
classical sense. Its political leaders assume a stance of neutrality with regard to
substantive cultural issues. They don’t condition trade, aid, or protection on
changes in local gender ideals, forms of authority, kinship structures, or coming
of age ceremonies. They don’t try to tell the members of different nations or
primordial groups that they have to live together or love each other or share the
Geertz’schallenGe 225
same moral values, emotional reactions, aesthetic ideals, and religious beliefs.
They don’t try to tell them how to run their private lives, or even that they must
have private lives.
Imagine that in this world order various sanctioning mechanisms make
it possible to enforce minimal rules of respect for persons, civility, and safety
within ethnic enclaves and between primordial groups: exit visas are always
available, and no aggression is permitted across territorial boundaries. Imagine
that such a world order is set up to permit or encourage decentralized control
over cultural issues and hence to promote robust cultural pluralism.
It seems likely, and perhaps even necessary, that the worldwide liberal mul-
tinational empire envisioned in prophecy # will be stratified or operate at two
levels, global and local. One tier, the transnational level, would need to be occu-
pied by cosmopolitan liberals, who are trained to appreciate and value political
pluralism and cultural diversity and to run the global institutions of the world
system.
The other tier would need to be more milletlike and occupied by nation-
based folk with primordial attachments to their cultural and religious heri-
tages who are not necessarily liberal in their values and practices (although they
might be), and who are dedicated to one form or another of thick ethnicity and
inclined to separate themselves from others, thereby guaranteeing that there is
enough cultural and religious diversity remaining in the world for the cosmo-
politan liberals who run the global multinational state to appreciate. In con-
ceptualizing this third prophecy one imagines that the global elite (those who
are cosmopolitan and liberal), will come from diverse nationalities (as did the
Ottoman elite). In the universal cosmopolitan culture of the global tier of the
world system your ancestry and skin color will be far less important than your
educational credentials, your politically liberal values, and your travel plans.
Finally it should be possible in this New World Order for individuals to switch
tiers in both directions, moving from global state-based liberalism to local na-
tional identity and back, within the course of a single lifetime.
With regard to the implications of globalization for human betterment one
hazards this guess. If it should turn out as an empirical generalization that ag-
gregate wealth accumulation can be pulled off relying only on free trade across
borders and the shallow or thin aspects of Western society (weapons, informa-
tion technology), then nations won’t converge in their beliefs, values, and social
226 richarda.shweder
practices, even as they get richer. If aggregate economic growth is truly contin-
gent on the universal acceptance (or enforcement) of the deep or thick aspects
of the cultural heritage of any single nation or civilization, then nations will not
converge, and they won’t become significant players in the global wealth accu-
mulation game either, because their sense of their historical and ethical heritage
and their distinctive communal identity will supersede their desire for material
wealth. The deontological side of their nature, their sense of duty and attach-
ment to who they are as a people, will trump any simple utilitarian calculus; and
the successful preservation of their distinctive way of life may itself become the
measure of their own betterment.
Of course, divining successor regimes is a very hazardous business. And it
remains to be seen whether history will come to an end with the apotheosis of a
universal civilization (prophecy #), the universal triumph of ethnonationalism
with its many separated and autonomous nation (based)-states (prophecy #),
or whether human beings, having lived in multinational empires many times
before the modern era, are ready to do so again, even on politically liberal terms
(prophecy #). Geertz’s challenge is unsettling, and remains far from settled.
Notes
The essay was completed while the author was a Rosanna and Charles Jaffin Founders
Circle Member of the School of Social Science, Institute for Advanced Study in Princ-
eton, New Jersey. An early draft was presented at the seminar on “Law without Nations”
(organized by Austin Sarat) at Amherst College on February , . I wish to thank the
seminar members both for their critical comments and for their liberality with regard to
my interdisciplinary scouting expedition into the territories of the political philosophers
and the globalization theorists. I have benefited greatly from comments on a subsequent
draft of the essay from all of the following friends and scholars: Danielle Allen, Michael
Hechter, Benjamin Heineman, Jr., Yuval Jobani, Craig Joseph, Simon Lazarus, Ronald
Rappaport, Patricia Rosenfield, Joan Scott, Richard Taub, and Ning Wang.
. Clifford Geertz, “What Is a Country If It Is Not a Nation?” Brown Journal of World
Affairs (): –.
. See, esp., ibid.; and Geertz, “The World in Pieces: Cultural Politics at the End of
the Century,” FOCAAL: European Journal of Anthropology (): – (reprinted in
Geertz, Available Light: Anthropological Reflections on Philosophical Topics [Princeton:
Princeton University Press, ]); see also Geertz, “The Uses of Diversity,” Michigan
Quarterly Review (): –. For a much earlier and highly pertinent essay by
Geertz, one concerned to elucidate the character of “primordial political communities”
Geertz’schallenGe 227
(where self-consciousness about one’s kind and the sense of fellow feeling is based on
real or imagined communal ties of blood, language, region, religion, and shared social
practice) and the implication of perceived or felt primordial attachments for the forma-
tion of “civil political communities,” see Geertz, “The Integrative Revolution: Primordial
Sentiments and Civil Politics in the New States,” in C. Geertz, ed., Old Societies and New
States (New York: Free Press, ).
. Clifford Geertz, of course, was not the only writer to raise the challenge or pose
the questions discussed in this essay. One is heartened to see the sophistication and bril-
liance with which such issues have been taken up by a number of political philosophers,
including, for example, Michael Walzer, William Galston, Will Kymlicka, and many oth-
ers, including such scholars as Ernest Gellner and Michael Hechter. And it is humbling as
well. My own concerns with political theory have their origins (somewhat remotely) in
the discipline of cultural anthropology and not in political philosophy, and the hazard is
real of oversimplifying a complex field. See Michael Walzer, On Toleration (New Haven:
Yale University Press, ); William Galston, “Progressive Politics and Communitarian
Culture,” in Toward a Global Civil Society, ed. Michael Walzer (Oxford: Berghahn Books,
), –; Will Kymlicka, Multicultural Citizenship (New York: Oxford University
Press, ); Ernest Gellner, Nations and Nationalism (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University
Press, ); Michael Hechter, Containing Nationalism (Oxford: Oxford University Press,
). See also Stephen Macedo, Diversity and Distrust (Cambridge: Harvard University
Press, ); Rob Reich, Bridging Liberalism and Multiculturalism in American Educa-
tion (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, ); Ian Shapiro and Will Kymlicka, eds.,
Ethnicity and Group Rights (New York: New York University Press, ).
. Concerning some of these anxieties, conflicts, and domestic attempts at customs
control, see, for example, John Bowen, Why the French Don’t Like Headscarves (Princ-
eton: Princeton University Press, ); Joan W. Scott, The Politics of the Veil (Princeton:
Princeton University Press, ); Richard A. Shweder, Martha Minow, and Hazel R.
Markus, eds., Engaging Cultural Differences: The Multicultural Challenge in Liberal De-
mocracies (New York: Russell Sage Foundation Press, ); Unni Wikan, In Honor of
Fadime: Honor and Shame (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, ).
. Geertz, Available Light, .
. As a preliminary definition I use the term “nation” to refer to communities of
people who believe they are tied to each other by bonds of descent and a shared cultural
heritage. Much more will be said about “nations” and “states” and various forms of po-
litical community later in the essay.
. See, for example, Geertz: Islam Observed (New Haven: Yale University Press, );
The Interpretation of Cultures (New York: Basic Books, ); Negara: The Theatre State in
Nineteenth Century Bali (Princeton: Princeton University Press, ); Local Knowledge:
Further Essays in Interpretive Anthropology (New York: Basic Books, ).
. Geertz, Available Light, .
228 richarda.shweder
. Geertz, “What Is a Country If It Is Not a Nation?,” .
. Ibid., –. See also Geertz, “The Integrative Revolution”; and Ulf Hannerz,
“Speaking to Large Issues: The World, If It Is Not in Pieces,” in Clifford Geertz by His Col-
leagues, ed. R. A. Shweder and B. Good (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, ).
. For a useful collection of seminal readings on the idea of a national identity, see
Vincent P. Pecora, ed., Nations and Identities (Oxford: Blackwell Publishers, ).
. As quoted in John Gray, Isaiah Berlin (Princeton: Princeton University Press
, ).
. David Miller, “In Defense of Nationality,” in Nations, Cultures and Markets, ed.
Paul Gilbert and Paul Gregory (Abingdon: Avebury, ).
. Roger Scruton, Modern Culture (London: Continuum, ), –.
. David Fromkin, The Peace to End All Peace (New York: Holt, ), , . Con-
cerning Ottoman society, see also Caroline Finkel, Osman’s Dream: The History of the Ot-
toman Empire – (New York: Basic Books, ); Halil Inalcik, ed., An Economic
and Social History of the Ottoman Empire, vols. and (New York: Cambridge University
Press, ).
. Michael Walzer, “Response to Kukathas,” in Ethnicity and Group Rights, .
. Walzer, On Toleration.
. Samuel Huntington, The Clash of Civilizations and the Remaking of the World
Order (New York: Simon and Shuster, ).
. Jerry Z. Muller, “Us and Them: The Enduring Power of Ethnic Nationalism,”
Foreign Affairs (March/April ): –.
. Walzer, On Toleration, .
. See, for example, Hechter, Containing Nationalism.
. Muller, “Us and Them.”
. Concerning the situation in Belgium, see Robert H. Mnookin, “Ethnic Conflicts:
Flemings and Walloons, Palestinians and Israelis.” Daedalus: Journal of the American
Academy of Arts and Sciences (Winter ): –.
. The literature on the topic of U.S. exceptionalism is of course vast, ranging from
position papers by founders (for example, James Madison, Alexander Hamilton, and
John Jay in the Federalist Papers) to ethnographic or journalistic classics such as Alexis
de Tocqueville’s Democracy in America (Signet ; originally published in ) to con-
temporary philosophical texts such as John Rawls’s Political Liberalism (New York: Co-
lumbia University Press, ), Michael Walzer’s What Does It Mean to Be an American?
(New York: Marsilio Publishers, ), and William Galston’s Liberal Pluralism (New
York: Cambridge University Press, ), to detailed explications of the meaning of the
U.S. Constitution (for example, Akhil Amar’s American Constitution: A Biography [New
York: Random House, ]), to the many popular and scholarly historical accounts of
what Joseph Ellis has called “American Creation” in his best-selling book by that title
(New York: Vintage Books, ).
Geertz’schallenGe 229
. See, for example, Samuel Huntington, Where We Are: The Challenges to America’s
National Identity (New York: Simon and Shuster, ); also Huntington, “The West
Unique, Not Universal,” Foreign Affairs (): –.
. Michael Walzer, “Two Kinds of Universalism,” in Tanner Lectures on Human Val-
ues (Salt Lake City: University of Utah Press, ).
. Jan-Werner Muller, Constitutional Patriotism (Princeton: Princeton University
Press, ).
. The image of the United States of America as “a world-federation in miniature”
belongs to the early twentieth-century writer Randolph Bourne, who was himself influ-
enced by the writings of the American philosopher of cultural pluralism Horace Kallen.
With regard to the writings of Bourne and Kallen, see Stephen J. Whitfield, “Introduc-
tion to the Transaction Edition,” in Horace M. Kallen, Culture and Democracy in the
United States (London: Transaction Publishers, ; originally published in ).
. Commenting on a provocative (and in my judgment brilliant) essay in which
Chandra Kukathas explores the scope and limits of toleration for cultural diversity in
any domestic political regime, the political philosopher Michael Walzer writes (with
the Ottomans apparently in mind): “If a great warrior, or warrior tribe, conquered a
great number of communities and was content to rule them indirectly, collecting trib-
ute or taxes, leaving the local notables in place and allowing them to work out patterns
of coexistence with their immediate neighbors, this would be a regime of toleration
close to, though not identical with, Kukathas’s ideal. Unlike international society, which
just happens, this would, again, be a creation, someone’s project. But now the project
would not necessarily make for intolerance. The conquering warriors could celebrate
their triumphs, build monuments, and write histories, and so on, without giving rise to
a culture that was common to all their subjects. They would probably have contempt for
their subjects—and no interest in commonality—but contempt of this sort is entirely
consistent with toleration. The subject communities could still organize their own lives,
maintaining among their members practices that a liberal democracy would not toler-
ate.” Walzer, “Response to Kukathas,” ). What precisely those intolerable practices or
“un-American activities” ought to be in a liberal state (based)-nation such as the United
States is presumably a collective judgment that will be historically constrained by a pro-
cess of interpretation of the constitutional blueprint for the state. In the instance of U.S.
national identity “constitutional patriotism” might be quite consistent with tolerance
for the diverse social practices of the different primordial groups living within the ter-
ritory of a multinational state, although the scope and limits of that tolerance (for ex-
ample, over practices such as gay marriage, head scarves, neonatal circumcision, prayer
in school, polygamy) will always be matters for debate.
. The one hyphenated identity that appears to have been historically treated as
the most alien (or “other”) to American national identity was “American-communist.”
Contrast this with the situation in Italy or France, where Italian-communists or French-
230 richarda.shweder
communists are not viewed as subversive outsiders or as foreign to national identity. One
is tempted to speculate that this has something to do with the difference between a state
(based)-nation and a nation (based)-state. It is communism (perceived as a threat to the
foundational principles of the state [based]-nation) that gets viewed as alien to national
identity in the United States, while it is Islam (and its mismatch with the traditions of
the primordial nation [based]-state) that seems threatening to national identity in Den-
mark. The idea of an Indian Muslim-American is no less imaginable than German Jew-
ish-American or Anglo-Protestant American; such hyphenated identities are perfectly
grammatical within the language of the American national identity, and in the relevant
state (based) American sense of nationality all three types of hyphenated Americans are
equally Americans.
. A note sent by Thomas Jefferson to Rabbi Jacob de la Motta. September , .
. The expression the “melting pot” derives from a play by that title written by
Israel Zangwell.
. Justice William O. Douglas, DeFunis v. Odegaard, U.S. ().
. Here allow me to underline the conjectural and speculative nature of the re-
maining sections of the essay and note that the discussion of globalization and the three
prophecies directly draws on or repeats, and seeks to unify and extend, several previ-
ous writings, for example, Richard A. Shweder, “Moral Maps, First World Conceits, and
the New Evangelists,” in Culture Matters: How Values Shape Human Progress, ed. Law-
rence Harrison and Samuel Huntington (New York: Basic Books, ); also Richard A.
Shweder, Why Do Men Barbecue?: Recipes for Cultural Psychology (Cambridge: Harvard
University Press, ).
. By the lights of this conception of human betterment, human patterns of equal-
ity or inequality (both within and between nations and states and over time) are viewed
as secondary issues or as subordinate to the end of aggregate wealth accumulation on a
global scale. In other words, such patterns of equality or inequality in the distribution
of wealth are viewed as one of the social means to the end of aggregate human wealth
production, and are thus evaluated as good or bad solely (and instrumentally) in those
terms. The cosmopolitan elites who have the greatest voice in the emerging New World
Order differ in the extent to which they believe that aggregate wealth accumulation is the
gold standard for evaluating the impact of any globalization measure, or whether other
criteria (patterns of human equality, the capacity to maintain one’s cultural heritage, the
capacity to exercise political sovereignty, individual liberty) matter as well, or more.
. Quoted in Jerry Z. Muller, The Mind and the Market (New York: Knopf, ),
.
. Francis Fukayama, The End of History and the Last Man (New York: Free Press,
).
. Robert Kagan, The Return of History and the End of Dreams (New York: Knopf,
). Think, for example, of the persistence of the varieties of ideological differences
Geertz’schallenGe 231
between just these four states alone: Russia, Iran, China, and the United States; think
too about all the significant ideological differences between primordial groups within a
single multinational state such as Iraq or Nigeria or (these days) even Holland.
. For more on progressive views of the march of history, see Keith Baker, Con-
dorcet: From Natural Philosophy to Social Mathematics (Chicago: University of Chicago
Press, ).
. John Lennon’s nationless, propertyless brotherhood of pacified, sated, and fully
secularized cosmopolitan individuals whose oneness consists of the shared absence of
any homeland or primordial attachments other than to “the World” is anarchic, fanciful,
and utopian, but it does capture in its own lyrical way the universalizing spirit of “end of
history” augury.
. I have narrated these experiences before: see, for example, Shweder, Why Do
Men Barbecue? For an earlier schematic discussion of the three prophesies, see Shweder,
“Moral Maps.”
. For a discussion of the way the liberal institution of private property can serve
the communitarian purposes of primordial groups, see, for example, Nomi Stolzenberg,
“The Culture of Property,” in Shweder, Minow, and Markus, eds., Engaging Cultural Dif-
ferences.
. Huntington, “The West Unique, Not Universal.”
. Those who view the United States as an Anglo-Protestant nation (based)-state
(for example, Samuel Huntington) are often advocates for robust cultural pluralism on
a global scale while at the same time opposing domestic cultural pluralism or “multicul-
turalism” inside their own nation (based)-state. “You may have your culture and civili-
zation,” they seem to be saying to members of other nations, “but please stay away and
let me have mine!” Opposition to foreign immigration readily follows from this stance.
Consequently, those who view American national identity as ethnonational in character,
as the unique and sovereign expression of a way of life distinctive of Anglo-Protestant
ethnicity, race, religion, and culture, are often wary of immigrants (Mexican Catholics,
Eastern European Jews, Chinese) who have primordial ties to ancestral groups other
than those that are Anglo-Protestant.
. If one had to bet, I would place my own bet on this prophecy.
. See Hechter, Containing Nationalism.
. Hannah Arendt, “Reflections on Little Rock,” Dissent (): –.
. Galston, Liberal Pluralism, .
. Paul Q. Hirst, ed., The Pluralistic Theory of the State: Selected Writings of G. D. H.
Cole, J. N. Figgis, and H. J. Laski (New York: Routledge, ), .
. See Fromkin, The Peace to End All Peace, .
. Finkel, Osman’s Dream, .